FENDOI Résumé de rapport

Research and standardization efforts during the past years have been intensified towards extending the scope of access networking to cover larger geographical areas and numbers of users. The main driver has been the reduction of CAPEX/OPEX costs by enabling consolidation of current Local Offices to a much reduced number of Central Offices. This paradigm blurs the hitherto defined boundaries between the access and the metro segments – the central offices become effectively Edge Nodes, required to handle significantly increased amount of user traffic.

The goal of this project is to define novel, resilient, cost- and energy-efficient architectures achieving efficient access-core interconnection and convergence among heterogeneous access technologies, services and applications. During the first period of the project, we focused on consolidating the following areas: studies on novel architectures, topologies and technologies for access-core interfaces, flexible optical transmission and energy efficiency and cost issues.

FENDOI explored novel and resilient architectures achieving optimized access-core interconnection and convergence among heterogeneous access technologies, services and applications. This has been reflected in the proposal and demonstration of a technology to slice signals from high-speed core/metro links into low-speed streams suitable for access networks. We also demonstrated flexible optical transmission using programmable FPGA.

FENDOI also considered energy efficiency and techno-economic aspects of these technologies. Energy efficiency is inherently achieved by reducing the number of consolidated central offices and enabling methodologies for efficient usage of resources. Within the FENDOI project, we have investigated the energy impact of implementing flexible nodes using the spectral slicing technique, providing hard-numbers on the advantages of this technology.

FENDOI has work in the first period considering 10 Gbps baseline links; at the end of this project, we would have proposed and validated concepts to achieve ultra high data rates (up to 100Gbps per wavelength), enhanced resource utilization and flexible bandwidth allocation at sub-wavelength granularities. The timely generated knowledge in this project will contribute to extend the-state-of-the-art and enhance European research excellence and competitiveness in developing future communication networks.